kottke.org posts about food
Interview with chefs Grant Achatz of Alinea and Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck, mostly about the cookbooks that they’re working on. Achatz is self-publishing the Alinea Book and using the exact recipes from the restaurant:
For us, we felt the most important thing was to express the restaurant in its most accurate fashion, and try to convey to the reader what Alinea and the food are all about. We felt that if we eliminated some of the techniques because they were too difficult, or some of the ingredients because they were too hard to find, then you would be left with something that’s not representative of the restaurant or of the cuisine itself. So our effort was to convey the emotion, the expression, the essence of the restaurant, and also hopefully-if the recipes are written well enough-to dispel the myth that cooking in this style is impossible for somebody who isn’t a professional cook.
He also mentions that the ingredient amounts in the recipes are metric, meaning that a digital scale is required. Maybe they should make the cookbook itself a digital scale…just make the cover a little thicker, throw some sensors in there with a digital display in the lower right hand corner, and there you go!
Video of Charlie Rose’s conversation with chef Thomas Keller the other night. Good stuff as always, although I’m disappointed about how completely he’s embraced the idea of the chef as empire-tender rather than as a person who cooks.
I realized the other day that I prefer eating at places where the person that owns the place is in the kitchen because no one else is going to care as much about your meal and experience as that person. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t find excellent food and experiences at Per Se or the diner around the corner, but the increasingly prevalent fine dining empires feel like, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, “too little butter spread over too much toast”. (via eater)
The NY Times dining section has a fun pair of articles today about cooking on the cheap. First, Henry Alford prepared all his meals for a week using ingredients purchased from 99-cent stores.
Because the main Jack’s store can have an unpredictable inventory — yesterday’s huge display of Progresso soup is today’s much-smaller hillock of marinated mushrooms is tomorrow’s sad heap of slightly battered boxes of Royal gelatin — shopping there is a return to the improvisatory cooking of yore, when people made dinner with whatever was in the market.
Trader Joe’s shoppers are already accustomed to those constraints. The Times also enlisted Eric Ripert, chef/owner of NYC’s 4-star Le Bernadin, to construct an entire menu using primarily 99-cent items; 5 dishes and 3 desserts for $40.
A butter sauce was whisked into shape to dress frozen crab cakes and Seabrook Farms vegetables. Canned coconut milk went into the jasmine rice and the jarred marinara sauce for baked salmon filets. “Wild salmon for 99 cents!” Mr. Ripert said, in disbelief.
Here’s a slideshow of Ripert and his team creating their dishes and his recipe for tuna rillettes. Take that, Sandra Lee.
Update: NPR recently aired a show on Cooking Gourmet with 99¢ Food, featuring Christiane Jory’s The 99¢ Only Stores Cookbook, which is due to be released on April 1. Neither Times article makes mention of Jory’s book, which seems like an obvious influence (or an incredible coincidence). If the book was an influence, this is bad form on the part of the Times. (thx, janelle)
A list of amusing restaurant names presented somewhat oddly in scholarly paper format. Pony Espresso is a coffeehouse in Wyoming, Wiener Takes All in a hot dog place in Illinois, and Wholly Mackerel is a Gulf Coast seafood place.
This week’s New Yorker has a profile of David Chang, chef/owner of the Momofuku family of restaurants. The profile isn’t online but Ed Levine has a nice write-up with some quotes.
Just because we’re not Per Se, just because we’re not Daniel, just because we’re not a four-star restaurant, why can’t we have the same fucking standards? If we start being accountable for not only our own actions but for everyone else’s actions, we’re gonna do some awesome shit. […] I know we’ve won awards, all this stuff, but it’s not because we’re doing something special — I believe it’s really because we care more than the next guy.
Reading the article, it appears that Chang is using Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef as a playbook here. Caring more than the next guy is right out of the Thomas Keller section of the book…with his perfectly cut green tape and fish swimming the correct way on ice, no one cares more than Keller.
Chef Dan Barber, proprietor of NYC’s Blue Hill, is planning on writing a book or two. I still fondly remember Barber’s Food Without Fear op-ed in the NY Times in 2004.
The celebrated food vendors at Red Hook’s ball fields have been awarded a six-year permit to “operate an ethnic and specialty food market in Red Hook Park, Brooklyn”. Says NYC food meister Ed Levine of the vendors:
The Red Hook Ballfields, where Latino families put up makeshift restaurants serving real, honest food of their home countries, is one of the last bastions of real food to be found in NYC. If it’s replaced by a Starbucks or a series of dirty water dog carts or some generic high bidder, it would be a travesty.
A recent favorite Buzzfeed trend: Insane Sandwiches.
It starts simply enough. At some point you decide you like cheeseburgers better than hamburgers. No big deal. Then one day you try your cheeseburger with bacon. And then after a while you think, you know what would be really good on this? Jalapeños. Jalapeños would be really good on this. And then you’re stuck. Hooked on Jalapeño Bacon Cheeseburgers, and you realize you can never go back.
Update: Speaking of cheeseburgers, feel free to blast these to bits. (thx, jeff & swissmiss)
Update: Aaron points me to the Luther Burger: “a hamburger, specifically a bacon cheeseburger, which employs a glazed donut in place of each bun.”
Ed Levine says the best gelato in NYC is being served in a tanning salon. My favorite banh mi (and perhaps the best baguette in town) can be found in the back of a jewelry store. Any other odd places to find good food?
The Riverdale Garden Restaurant in the Bronx is trying out a novel way of staying in business: they’re asking for their regulars to pledge $5000 in exchange for a year of free dinners.
Michael had put The Riverdale Garden up for sale for the past several months and had a buyer. However, the landlord “killed” the deal. We are now forced to close for good or rely on our best customers to put their money where their mouths are! Quite literally…….. You will be eating your investment. Bottom line is we have 12 couples so far ready to invest $5000 in dining credits, however we need 38 more.
(via eater)
The other day I posted a link to an article about Hervé This that mentioned how to unboil an egg.
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
Michael Pusateri tried it out (using vitamin C) and it didn’t work so well.
The egg was whole and appeared completely unaffected. The texture of the egg outside felt normal and in no way ‘unboiled’. While I am a professional engineer, I am a amateur scientist. There are several reasons this process might not have unboiled the egg.
Any molecular gastronomists out there want to give this one a shot?
How to unboil an egg:
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
That’s from an article on Hervé This, a French chemist whose medium is food.
Not much to say about this but this “I Love You, but You Love Meat” headline is best said aloud in Barney’s singsong voice.
Ok, there’s a bit more to say. When Meg and I first started dating, she was an almost-vegan (she ate fish and maybe eggs (I forget)). Now she eats meat and cheese and the like with greater zeal than I do. Sometimes I feel as though encouraging her to abandon veganism was my greatest contribution to our relationship; that we enjoy eating similar things has made things a lot easier.
Oh, and I love the word “vegangelical”…reminds me of Buzzfeed’s vegansexuals trend.
Jürgen Stumpf owns three wine bars in Berlin that operate on the honor system.
For the price of 1 euro (about $1.50), you rent yourself a glass and get to sample as many of the wines as you want. At the end of the night you throw some bills or coins into a big jar, the amount based on what you think is fair.
Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour… Who fares worst health-wise, diet soda drinkers or fried food eaters? Surprisingly, researchers have found a correlation between diet soda consumption and metabolic syndrome.
The one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none.
What I Learned Today did some further digging and found a different study that links diet soda consumption and obesity.
For diet soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:
- 36.5% for up to 1/2 can each day
- 37.5% for 1/2 to one can each day
- 54.5% for 1 to 2 cans each day
- 57.1% for more than 2 cans each day.
The Incompatible Food Triad. Are there three foods that don’t taste good together but every pair of them does?
There are many ways to interpret this “going together” but an example solution would be three pizza toppings — A, B, and C — such that a pizza with A and B is good, and a pizza with A and C is good, and a pizza with B and C is good, but a pizza with A, B, and C is bad. Or you might find three different spices or other ingredients which do not go together in some recipe yet any pair of them is fine.
(via josh)
Noted food scientist Harold McGee takes a look at the microbiological consequences of double dipping a chip into a bowl of dip.
Prof. Paul L. Dawson, a food microbiologist, proposed it after he saw a rerun of a 1993 “Seinfeld” show in which George Costanza is confronted at a funeral reception by Timmy, his girlfriend’s brother, after dipping the same chip twice.
Over at Slice (the pizza blog!), Adam Kuban has compiled a list of all the different pizza styles found in the US.
Once the Italian immigrants brought their Naples-style pies to the States, it evolved a bit in the Italian neighborhoods of New York to something I’ve seen referred to as “New York-Neapolitan.” This is basically what all the coal-oven pizzerias of New York serve. It follows the tenets of Neapolitan style in that it’s thin-crusted, cooked in an ultra-hot oven, and uses a judicious amount of cheese and sauce (sauce which is typically fresh San Marzano tomatoes, as in Naples). It deviates from Naples-style in that it’s typically larger, a tad thinner, and more crisp.
There’s a surprising number of styles.
1. Usually when you order meat or cheese at the deli counter (e.g. “I’ll have a 1/2 pound of pastrami, please”), the person behind the counter tries to get as close as they can to the weight you ordered but it’s often a little over and you’re charged for the overage. I’ve noticed that what they do at Whole Foods is that they only charge you for what you asked for but they give you the little extra for free. So yesterday I asked for a 1/2 pound of roast beef, but it came out to 0.57 when he weighed it. He lifted a bit of the meat off the scale until it read 0.50, printed the ticket, and put the little extra back on the scale. It’s a nice gesture and a good example of using customer service instead of marketing or advertising to give a current customer a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company…and it only costs them 20 cents-worth of roast beef.
2. We went out to eat with some friends the other night but the restaurant was tiny, packed, and didn’t have anywhere to put Ollie’s stroller. So the owner took the stroller and put it in the back of his truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. (While there, we dined on a cheese plate with, like, 30 to 40 different cheeses on it, some of which were made by the stroller valet himself.)
The tales of Kobe beef cattle being raised in comfort with massages and the occasional beer might be a stretch of the truth: Kobe is expensive, delicious, but inhumanely raised beef.
From the time they are a week old until they are three and a half years old, these steers are commonly kept in a lean-to behind someone’s house where they get bored and go off their feed. Their gut stops working. The best way to start their gut working again is to give them a bottle of beer.
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it’s no contest: New York all the way.
What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins’, don’t you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I’d only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.
Ed’s a bit hard on Boston here…there’s some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.
Dave Pell, peanut butter expert, has found the best peanut butter in the world.
I love peanut butter. But more importantly for the statement you are about to read here, I know peanut butter. I know peanut butter the way Da Vinci knew fluid mechanics, the way Einstein knew physics, the way Grand Master Flash knows a turntable, the way Tom Brady knows how to perfectly balance throwing touchdowns and humping supermodels. I have eaten it. I have coddled it. I inhaled. What can I say? That’s how I spread.
A fine AV Club interview with the surprisingly down-to-earth Anthony Bourdain…much of it isn’t even about food. On selling out and endorsements:
Yeah, I’ve been offered cookware lines, some really gruesome reality shows that would have made me boatloads of money. The usual endorsements. I don’t know. Maybe it goes back to the heroin thing. I know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and feel ashamed of what you did yesterday. I’m just having a hard time crossing that line. I’d like to sell out. I really would!
I also learned that he writes crime novels.
Good news: Alinea’s Grant Achatz announces that his cancer is in remission. Achatz found out earlier this year that he had cancer of the mouth and instead of the traditional surgery route, he worked with his doctors on a treatment that would allow him to continue to cook, his profession and passion.
Foodpairing: extensive diagrams showing which foods go with other foods. See also the Synesthetic Cookbook.
NYC restaurant advice from a huge douchebag Don Juan about where to wine her, dine her, and then complete the rhyming trifecta later that evening.
I have given much thought to this question of romantic restaurants. In each case you have to study the girl and find the right restaurant for her. One If by Land, Two If by Sea. Forget it. A joke. The Terrace. Never. Never. The minute you walk in she knows what you have in mind. You might as well write her a note ‘Tonight I expect to do it.’ It’s too obvious.
(via eater)
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